Overview

A photograph freezes time in two dimensions, but good photographs take the viewer beyond those limits to tell a story, evoke emotions, provoke a response. When Paul Dix lived in Nicaragua in the 1980s, photographing the Contra war for the U.S.-based Witness for Peace, his images often conveyed the pathos of a nation whose revolutionary hopes were turned to ashes by an empire that struck back with brutal efficiency. Dix s images mothers at funerals, children without limbs, school-age youth with guns instead of books faithfully recorded the effects of war on a small country. You can t view the images without feeling anger or pity or even wonder. Yet his work was more than the conflict pornography we ve come to expect from war zones. He also captured the beauty of Nicaragua s rugged countryside and the dignity of its hardy peasants. His collection of images remains a remarkable contribution to understanding, at an intimately personal level, a very painful period in Central America s political history. And now he has done more. Along with Pam Fitzpatrick, an activist who spent those years organizing in the United States to stop the war, Dix has taken some of his more iconic images and allowed us to meet their subjects again, two decades later, in a new book. Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy is a monumental contribution that fleshes out those people we ve seen in just two dimensions, providing us a unique window onto the country, helping us understand what happened in the 1980s, and what has happened since. Dix and Fitzpatrick made four trips to Central America over seven years, spending 18 months tracking down people for whom they often didn t even have a name, just a grainy black-and-white image from a fleeting moment years before. Determined detective work eventually led them to almost everyone they were looking for. During these reencounters, Dix would photograph them again, and he and Fitzpatrick would record their stories of what had happened in the intervening years. Sometimes these are powerful narratives of how people overcame both personal obstacles and social strictures. Other times they are stories with no happy ending, of people left irreparably damaged by the violence. There is no common thread to their stories except that they are all victims in one way or another of a war organized and financed by the U.S. government. The book includes photos of 30 people. Possessing wounds both visible and invisible, they represent Nicaragua s complicated demographics, including those who are still loyal Sandinistas and others who blame the Sandinistas for everything. Still others, consumed with daily survival, long ago grew tired of ascribing political responsibility for their plight. The bilingual text summarizes their stories, and their testimonies appear in the back of the book. Some of the stories remind us of the feistiness of Nicaraguans, of the revolutionary spirit that has outlasted the political compromises and corruption of the revolutionary party. Dix photographed Jamileth Chavarría in 1987 as she leaned on a cross at the burial of her mother, who was killed by the Contras on the muddy road into the remote jungle outpost of Bocana de Paiwas. A 2002 photograph shows Chavarría at the microphone in a women s radio station in Paiwas. Her accompanying testimony tells of how she s creatively combating the violence against women embodied in Nicaraguan culture as well as in the policies of both government and church. --North American Congress on Latin Americaan extraordinary book of stunning black and white images of the men and boys, women and girls, who lost limbs and loved ones and managed to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on after 10 years of devastating conflict. . . . unique and riveting . . . Seldom do world-class war photographers get a chance to go back years later to follow up on what happened to the people in their dramatic images. Paul Dix, a staff photographer for the organization Witness for Peace from 1985 to 1990, documented the suffering caused by the U.S. foreign policy decision to arm and train counterrevolutionaries fighting against the Sandinista government, which overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. In 2002 he and Pam Fitzpatrick, a Witness for Peace colleague, returned to Nicaragua in search of 100 people who were subjects of Mr. Dix s photographs, people whose lives had been irrevocably changed by war. The result of their 17-month odyssey is an extraordinary book of stunning black and white images of the men and boys, women and girls, who lost limbs and loved ones and managed to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on after 10 years of devastating conflict. The book documents the follow-up with 30 people whose stories had particularly moved Mr. Dix. The then and now shots are displayed alongside brief quotes from the survivors, very personal reflections on how they managed to live through the violence and somehow find the courage and resilience to heal and hope for a better future. Not only do the images burn into the reader s consciousness, but the simple words of the victims also make powerful statements about the very real horrors of war. The testimonies and the brief explanatory text are in English and Spanish. One of the people Mr. Dix and Ms. Fitzpatrick searched for and found was Felix Pedro Espinales Mendoza, whom Mr. Dix had photographed in 1987. The memories of a nighttime contra attack on his village still haunt him. And there, my brother and I walk on top of the dead. I touch the hands, I touch the blown-apart bodies, everything. . . . And only I, my brother, and a little girl, very young, survived the attack. (Bocana de Paiwas, March 1, 2005). Dispersed throughout the black and white imagery are children s drawings, sporadic bursts of color of houses on fire, bodies lying on the ground, and tears running down simple oval faces. This unique and riveting book belongs in every library across the Americas, on all the desks of foreign policy decisionmakers in Washington, and in the hands of human rights activists everywhere. An eloquent introduction by internationally renowned Nicaraguan poet Giaconda Belli underscores the book s importance: Let us open this book, let our eyes wander over the luminous black and white of these photographs, over the tenderness yet also the iron will to live expressed by these people whom the war damaged but could not destroy. And let us reflect on the need to forever put an end to a violence which belittles us all. Reviewer Kathy Barber Hersh is a 30-year veteran of television and documentary production, including five years as a foreign correspondent for ABC News in Latin America. She devotes substantial time to youth advocacy and chaired a coalition that succeeded in introducing mandatory bullying prevention training in Florida public schools. She is also the author of the book, Protect Yourself From Crime, and has published widely in both magazines and newspapers. She covered the war in Nicaragua in 1978 1979 as a correspondent for ABC News; she also lived in Mexico for five years as a correspondent for ABC News. --New York Journal of Books